If by any chance you read this blog just for the articles, it's my duty to inform you that you are missing out on most of the fun. UR may not be the smartest blog on the net, but it certainly has the smartest commenters. This is probably just because it's new, and the yahoos haven't arrived yet. But it remains wondrous to me.

(At some point I may slacken the flow of verbiage so that old discussions stay fresh longer. I feel it's important, since UR is a new blog, to maintain a pretty brutal tempo, so that the site doesn't seem inviting to the wrong kind of reader. Hopefully at some point there will be a critical mass of disgruntled, speed-reading malcontents who can discipline their own ranks.)

There were a couple of comments on my original ultracalvinism post that I didn't get a chance to respond to. Rather than posting to a long-dead thread, I thought I'd bring them out here.

Michael points out that, given that most of us think of the essence of Calvinism as predestination (the doctrine that God, who knows all things, knows which of us will or will not be saved), describing progressive-idealists (who are universalists in the strict Christian sense, ie, they believe we are all saved) as "ultracalvinist" is pretty strange.

And indeed I am bending the usual meaning a little here. The reason I think I can get away with this is simple: if you define Calvinism in Michael's way, Calvinism is pretty much as dead as Mithraism.

Is there really anyone in the world in 2007 who is seriously concerned with the Synod of Dort? Who has any strong opinions at all on the subjects of unconditional election, total depravity, the perseverance of the saints, limited atonement, or irresistible grace - the "Five Points" of orthodox Calvinism?

Well, actually, they do have opinions about one of these: irresistible grace. This is the general path of doctrinal evolution: unused organs atrophy, and the whole machine becomes stripped down, like white cave-fish that shed their eyes. Jefferson dumped the Trinity, Emerson relieved us of Hell, and so on down to Harvey Cox and his "secular theology." (If you think "secular" is synonymous with "atheistic," the full horror of the situation is not yet clear to you.)

When Michael - along with, admittedly, most educated people - equates Calvinism with predestination (aka unconditional election), he is applying what in an older post I called a nominalist classification strategy. That is, he is taking Calvinist theology at face value. Calvinism defines itself as the Five Points, so why shouldn't we respect this?

Here's why: because the result that the nominalist approach produces is that a replicating prototype of considerable political and cultural significance, with known pathological tendencies, has simply disappeared. It has become extinct. There is no need at all to worry about it. These are not the droids you're looking for.

If we apply either the morphological or cladistic strategies, however, we get a very different result. The replicator at once pops back into view. It has not disappeared at all - it just mutated into Unitarianism (that is, non-universalist Unitarianism, now itself extinct), which begat Transcendentalism, which begat Unionism, Progressivism and the ecumenical movement, which became the "super-protestant" Establishment so derided by the late great flower children, who conquered it and gave us multiculturalism, "diversity," etc.

Not an unusual turn of events at all. Belief systems and languages evolve in much the same ways, and if you look at the historical gyrations of, say, English, the evolution from Calvinism to ultracalvinism seems positively straightforward and sedate.

And when we use the adaptive method, the result is even more disturbing.

First, of course, this trick of dropping off the radar screen is very suspicious. In fact, as I pointed out in my last post, ultracalvinism has extremely compelling reasons for not wanting to be known as either Christian or Protestant, because its patterns of intolerance are extremely ugly and familiar to anyone who can swallow any such taxonomy. (Peter Hitchens has called its Limey equivalent "the most intolerant faith to dominate Britain since the Reformation.") If there was ever a general understanding that "political correctness" is merely a case of common-or-garden religious intolerance, its apologists would find their jocular habit of excusing it as a kind of intellectual rowdiness, boys-will-be-boys and so on, to no longer roll so smoothly off their tongues, and its foes would find themselves infinitely better-armed.

But worst, the adaptive method does not identify predestination as the salient invariant of Calvinism. Nor does it focus on total depravity or even irresistible grace.

Instead, it notes that a shared feature of all prototypes in this line of descent, from Calvin to Emerson to Hillary Clinton, from Geneva to Chautauqua to the Haight-Ashbury, has been their assiduous insistence on building God's kingdom on Earth.

Of course this is what Erich Voegelin called "immanentizing the eschaton." Doctrinally, it originates in a postmillennial interpretation of the Book of Revelation. If you disagree with this interpretation, as many do, you might say (as Michael has) that this represents a rejection of Christianity in favor of gnosticism.

But again, this is nominalism. And it is also focusing, as I have said many times, on metaphysical beliefs. By definition metaphysical beliefs cannot be directly adaptive, that is, they cannot by themselves create an incentive to alter the real world in ways that improve the belief system's ability to transmit itself.

Whereas building God's kingdom on earth is certainly a physical action, and the belief that it is morally imperative is certainly a physical belief. And is it adaptive? Can Kobe drive the lane? Did Zeppelin rock? Does the Pope... etc.

So when we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said "how ya doin," invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this safe epistemology? I think not.

There was another comment in the thread I wanted to respond to, but I'm out of time for today. I'll try and get to it tomorrow.

14 Comments:

Michael said...

I never thought I'd find myself accused of nominalism, but I suppose it is a part of how any person who has been subjected to a modern education habitually thinks. This kind of nominalism is not drunk direct from the mediæval fount, but comes to us indirectly, through Condillac, into the Enlightenment, and affects our discourse in ways of which we are mostly not conscious.

For example, every time we refer to "oxygen" we reflect the (erroneous) belief of the element's discoverer A.-L. Lavoisier, who was a disciple of Condillac's, that it was a necessary component of any acid; so he named it, from oxus (acid) and genesthai (to give birth). Sir Humphry Davy was rightly critical of Lavoisier for this reason, not only for his factual error in this instance but for his general practice of nomenclature: the belief that we should name something to reflect how we think about it is intended to affect how others think about it, an undertaking that injects bias into the properly dispassionate investigations of science.

Unfortunately, it takes a great deal of effort to throw over conventions of naming, however biased they may be, and I suppose I am guilty of following the path of least resistance in this respect.

I should point out that Voegelin not only coined the phrase "immanentizing the eschaton" to describe the activity of those who would build the kingdom of heaven on earth, but who identified such people as "gnostic." I merely followed him in this, as well.

The intellectual genealogy of the modern "ultracalvinists" (or whatever one wants to call them) you have presented is impeccable. The issue, I suppose, is whether they are legitimately descended! Marcion, or Arius, assuredly, thought of themselves as Christian; Marcionism or Arianism could certainly not have developed had not there earlier been Christianity; but just as Marcionites and Arians are bastard offspring of Christianity, disowned by its respectable family, so, I suggest, are modern "gnostics" in the sense intended by Voegelin. Let us therefore difference the scutcheon of the "ultracalvinists" with bend sinister or bordure compony.

Having done with this, I'm curious what you thought about my comments on the antinomianism of the "utlracalvinist" elect, and the sort of philosophizing sociopathy they exhibit. It seems to me that here is where the breeding shows itself true, even if on the wrong side of the blanket.

History isn't my field and it's possible that I'm just plain wrong , but I think what you are calling "mainline Protestantism" is actually more like a minor heresy that infected Protestantism, and that the reason it was largely able to capture the interchuch organizations is that they cared about such things and most Protestants don't. Nobody (literally nobody) thinks the World Council of Churches has any authority over them, and pretty much the only people who think it speaks for them are ones that have a mistaken impression as to what it's saying.

This is my Lutheran upbringing talking here, so although it may not be 100% historically accurate, but it is mainline Protestant thought: the reason The Reformation happened was that the Catholic Church at the time 1) was notoriously corrupt as a secular institution and 2) had a doctrine which was no longer based on scripture.That Luther himself was a bit of a nut and the early Protestants were largely repulsive fanatics, while probably true, is irrelevant since nobody much cares about Luther's personal opinions, and probably few ever did. What Luther did that was significant was 1) deny the final authority of the Pope to declare doctrine (and not just Leo, but any sort of worldly authority figure) and 2) translate the Bible into German. The idea that Scripture is the Word Of God, and that it is the duty of the individual believer to learn and understand Scripture for himself rather than take some pastor or priest or pope's word for it is the very essence of Protestantism.

The idea that a religion is just a collection of festivals, rituals (which one needn't be too scrupulous about observing) and legends (which nobody really believes these days, and probably never did), and that all religions are somehow true ("true" meaning whatever it makes you happy to believe, there is no real truth) could not be more alien to this.

I find your genealogy of nominalism very cogent, although I think of it more as symptom than disease.

Except for math, music theory, etc, both of which are useful only in very restricted contexts, words are the tools we use to think. And in my opinion, pace Orwell, it's worth a little work to keep their edges sharp.

As various misguided actors find it adaptively useful to misuse them (witness "diversity"), they dull with age. Language becomes cant.

And it is not just interesting to eradicate cant, but to examine it. Like haplotypes, the patterns of cant reveal the adaptive landscape of the mental past. How did one word from a judicial opinion by Lewis Powell ("diversity") become, in less than thirty years, a focus of mass reverence?

I understand that you are following Voegelin's terminology, and he certainly made his mark (although "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" buttons are seldom seen these days).

But I would characterize him, as well, as one of the many brave pilots whose torpedo hit the ventral asteroid plate.

The trouble is this temptation to identify the problem as some alien element, some unnatural invasion that can easily be excised from the healthy tissue of Christianity, or democracy, or whatever.

This is the general conservative prescription. And if my view, that leftism is Protestantism and Protestantism is leftism, has anything of the truth about it, conservatism amounts to treating cancer with antibiotics. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but do the results contradict it?

Because adaptively, the question of legitimacy is a nullity. The real question is: what factors cause this strain of antinomian Protestantism to outcompete its more benign competitors? Is there some essential cause that can be removed?

Can we know? We can't. But my guess is that the factors are not to be found in theology.

My guess is that if you could somehow eradicate every Christian sect in the United States besides charismatic Pentecostalism and Mormonism, closed all the universities and other ultracalvinist bastions, but did not change the political structure, and left the system alone for 100 years, you would see liberal Pentecostalists and liberal Mormons, with almost exactly the same views now held by the descendants of the Puritans. Their theology might differ, but the social structures would be very similar, I suspect.

In fact, of course, we see just the same thing in Catholicism - "liberation theology." And of course there is "scientific socialism," its atheistic equivalent.

Basically, it's my belief that the essential adaptive cause of these tendencies is the feedback loop between information and security. In a society where this loop is not interrupted, all belief systems will adaptively specialize themselves to capture the state, thus promoting themselves and discouraging their competitors.

We can distinguish two phases of this disease, the aggressive phase and the maintenance phase. We are in the latter now with ultracalvinism.

The decentralized Polygon model is really state-of-the-art when it comes to maintenance, because it is full of functional overlaps and small competitions. Any institution that flags in its zeal will swiftly be attacked by the others - as universities, for example, attack the IMF and World Bank, even though these are core Polygon members with an impeccable blue history.

In fact, we can even see the whole red-blue divide as an exaggerated case of this conflict - the US military, despite occasional appearances, is not in fact a continuation of the Confederacy. It too has its ancient blue roots.

Nonetheless, this system is clearly in the downward slope of its lifecycle, as we see emerging cultural traits that are clearly maladaptive for the entire system, but advance the interests of its components or of individuals.

Antinomianism is an excellent example. For individuals, pushing the antinomian envelope is a success strategy, for the same reason a Silicon Valley bigshot might wear shorts to a board meeting - it's a way of proving you can. To be very crude, it puts your dick on the table.

Universities tolerate and even encourage antinomianism (a) to be competitive with ones that don't, and (b) because the quasiviolent energy displayed by antinomian "activists" is a nice power source.

But obviously, for the survival of the entire system, this is very much a senescent tendency, and it has been mirrored in many other declining societies, for example of course Athens.

My comment to Michael might answer some of your questions. Also, I mean the same thing by mainline Protestant as La Wik.

Obviously, as someone who was not raised a Christian, I will always see Christianity a little differently from those who were.

But I don't disagree at all with your description of the Protestant genesis. And I certainly do not see religion as a collection of rituals, native folk dances, etc - if, as I contend, the theological details are relatively irrelevant, mere customs are surely more so.

Rather, I see religions (and idealisms) as patterns of thinking. These patterns tend to be relatively conserved, which is why we can name and classify them.

But, again, we should be very careful about classifying belief systems using the taxonomy they choose for themselves. There is a reason why so many common names for these prototype kernels originated as terms of abuse hurled by their enemies. Not that we should trust said enemies, either.

So, yes: Luther's realization was that Catholic Christianity as practiced had gotten completely out of whack with the scriptures. But I think there's slightly more to it than that.

Christianity is a fascinating and impressive belief system in many ways, and perhaps one of the neatest things about it is that, historically, it is really two belief systems in one.

Christianity, to me, is half Roman state religion, half communal ecstatic fraternity. I find the Anglican terms high church and low church useful in describing these phenomena, even outside the bounds of Anglicanism proper.

(There are certainly high-church and low-church Lutherans, for example! I was at quite a high-church Lutheran wedding just the other day; I practically expected the minister to break into German. Or even Latin.)

Elements of both these strains can be found in every Christian tradition, not least because (a) no one has found a way to live without government, despite all efforts; and (b) so much of the emotional appeal of Christianity is in the fictive-kinship idea that all men (or, depending on your theology, all Christians) are brothers.

Another, slightly harsher, way to put this is that the New Testament includes a complete and tested blueprint for a revolutionary communist cult. Small wonder the medieval Church kept it under wraps!

Lutheranism was not a communist cult. It succeeded more because it provided a way for local bigwigs to break away from Rome. But Calvinism came much closer, and the heritage is clear. Are we really to believe that Marx, on his own, invented the idea that all men are brothers, despite living in a society dominated by a religion whose creed taught exactly that?

So as for the beliefs of your average Lutheran versus the World Council of Churches - there is obviously a very clear high-church, low-church spread.

But, as the Russians say, the fish rots from the head down. Lutheranism is not intrinsically low-church, but it does not intrinsically preclude a low-church interpretation, either. And when Lutheran countries (Sweden!) are captured by low churchmen, who enjoy an obvious democratic advantage, the change over time can be dramatic.

The WCC matters not because it itself is somehow powerful, as if it were the Vatican, but because its views reflect the views of those in power.

And power propagates itself - as the Russians say, the fish rots from the head down. The opinions of followers are lagging indicators, the opinions of leaders are leading indicators. It matters less where Lutheranism came from, than where it's going, and the trend of syncretism with the Puritan elite strikes me as pretty clear.

This is the information-security feedback loop again. My view, again, is that democracy is both the cause and the result of this low-church avalanche. Whether vicious or virtuous, it's a circle of causation.

Essentially, in a republican form of government, power is won by having as many clients as possible - just as true for Hillary Clinton as it was for Caesar. And low-church Christianity is designed almost perfectly for building these kinds of patronage networks.

This is what the young people carrying clipboards for the environment are doing on my streetcorner. They are soldiers in an integrated religious and political war. Like all soldiers, our modern-day "activists" hope to gain power and status by rising in the ranks.

As long as this power structure is effective, Lutheranism and all other Christian sects - even Catholicism itself - will be ready, willing and able to evolve into it. If Faramir refuses the ring, there is always a Boromir who will accept it. What Acton meant when he said that power corrupts was that it seduces, and boy does it.

The problem is not Christianity. The problem is that if there is a vacuum of power, Christianity will evolve into its communist-cult form and try to seize it. This can only be cured, in my opinion, by eliminating the vacuum of power.

I like the word "ultracalvinism" because it traces the evolutionary roots of our present Establishment, and it vigorously denies their claim to be "moderate." However, it is not a term designed to convince people who already hold this belief system.

Low-church believers, being the same people who don't think of the EPA as "the government," have a very hard time seeing that (a) it is in fact their strain of Christianity which has the strongest associations with tyranny, and (b) diluting the theological content of Christianity, in favor of "secular" fraternity, brotherhood, and other God's-kingdom-on-Earth issues, makes it not milder but stronger. As Ernest Renan put it, "never trust a German when he tells you he's an atheist."

For example, every time we refer to "oxygen" we reflect the (erroneous) belief of the element's discoverer A.-L. Lavoisier, who was a disciple of Condillac's, that it was a necessary component of any acid; so he named it, from oxus (acid) and genesthai (to give birth).Perhaps we could call oxygen "sourstuff", but we can't call atoms "unclefts", since as atomic/nuclear science shows, they most certainly are divisible.

Marcion, or Arius, assuredly, thought of themselves as Christian; Marcionism or Arianism could certainly not have developed had not there earlier been Christianity; but just as Marcionites and Arians are bastard offspring of Christianity, disowned by its respectable familyWhen I was a Christian I never understood what was so bad about Monophysitism or Arianism. As a good sola scripture Protestant I thought their interpretation was no less fitting with the Bible than the orthodox ("Catholic" would be the better term, since that is the name given to the anti-monophysite and anti-Arian factions) one. I myself didn't pick a side and thought it a matter for theologians to dispute, along with angels dancing on the heads of pins.

Because adaptively, the question of legitimacy is a nullity.Oh, how I wish more people shared that view! Perhaps brain damage would help?

My guess is that if you could somehow eradicate every Christian sect in the United States besides charismatic Pentecostalism and Mormonism, closed all the universities and other ultracalvinist bastions, but did not change the political structure, and left the system alone for 100 years, you would see liberal Pentecostalists and liberal Mormons, with almost exactly the same views now held by the descendants of the Puritans.Razib has an excellent post on just that subject.

the New Testament includes a complete and tested blueprint for a revolutionary communist cult. Small wonder the medieval Church kept it under wraps!I tend to think it was much more a product of its times, but you might be interested in Koenraad Elst's Psychology of Prophetism, which has a somewhat similar theory.

"never trust a German when he tells you he's an atheist."Google has never heard that phrase before. Kind of like "fanatical Church of England bishops".

Renan wrote in French and I got the quote via Henry Thomas Buckle's very unusual masterpiece, History of Civilization in England, I believe. There was probably also some paraphrasing. Buckle is in Google Books, but the text does not appear to be searchable.

Razib has indeed noticed the seductive power of the dark side. (Although, of course, both sides are dark - which is pretty much the problem.) He still seems convinced of the objectivity of the center, though. The realization that when you dilute the theistic content of Christianity, it actually becomes more potent and dangerous, is a difficult one for most atheists.

Rather, I see religions (and idealisms) as patterns of thinking. These patterns tend to be relatively conserved, which is why we can name and classify them.

Okay, but that's another problem with the terminology. Usually when I hear "Puritanism" I think of something like "the opposite of hedonism". It's easy to see the Republicans of today as being (at least to an extent) the intellectual heirs of Prohibitionists, and of people who saw poverty largely as being a result of the laziness and general moral degeneracy of the poor.

But the modern "left", at least nominally, seems to be all about the idea of rejecting moral judgements. It's not just that they dispute that peoples' problems are the result of self-destructive actions in individual cases. Just considering the possibility is committing the offense of "blaming the victim".

Obviously you've never been caught throwing a glass bottle in the trash!

Puritans wanted to create what David Hackett Fischer calls, somewhat euphemistically, "ordered liberty." The forms of order have mutated completely, but the goal of a managed society, ie, a New Jerusalem, is remarkably consistent.

Mencius Moldbug said:The decentralized Polygon model is really state-of-the-art when it comes to maintenance, because it is full of functional overlaps and small competitions. Any institution that flags in its zeal will swiftly be attacked by the others - as universities, for example, attack the IMF and World Bank, even though these are core Polygon members with an impeccable blue history.This discussion has been fascinating to me, and not always easy to follow. The above paragraph was the part I was least able to follow. Is "decentralized Polygon" a new coinage? Is it from epistemology or somewhere else? I was just barely scraping by having just looked up "antinomianism"....

Let me paraphrase what I think you're saying and you can set me straight if I've gotten it wrong:Blue in this usage means progressive-idealist, possibly part of what Voegelin would call a "political religion" descended from (non-theological) gnosticism. So these blue institutions are trying to create a sort of heaven on earth by spreading a strange hybrid of collectivism and high finance (which I don't really understand), and while they appear at first glance to be fundamentally at odds, they are really just competing to be more blue. The big international banks get flak for showing not enough zeal (progressive zeal? - I don't understand that point quite yet) by universities. So a leftist critique of capital boils down to ultracalvinists debating theology, which became secular when no one was looking. Is that kind of what you meant?

Moving on from the Polygon paragraph to the rest: The ideas on this blog are really swimming around in my head, occasionally colliding. (Your point that metaphysical beliefs cannot be directly adaptive, that is, they cannot by themselves create an incentive to alter the real world in ways that improve the belief system's ability to transmit itself is something I’ll be thinking about for weeks, I wager.) I understand progressivism mainly from Christopher Lasch's True and Only Heaven ... is that a good starting place? How is your highly interesting use of "ultracalvinism" distinct from Voegelin's use of "gnosticism"? My views of both terms are so blurry they look pretty much the same.

The point may be too obvious to need stating, or I may have missed it, but when would you say ultracalvinism started really influencing US politics? Is the "City on a Hill" image that the free American republic could be an example to freedom-desiring people in other countries necessarily a sign that Americans wanted to run the world, dissolve nationalities, and immanentize a heaven they couldn't wait for? (I hope not, because I "City on a Hill" imagery and I loathe imperialism.) By the same token, is the desire to free slaves through moral suasion necessarily a product of the same thinking? I pick those as a couple of prominent examples of optimistic, possibly progressive thinking from the early US.

I ask because (a) I put a lot of stock in Voegelin / Lasch / UR type critiques of heaven-on-earth progressivism while (b) I'd like to think there is something truly positive a person can do for his fellow man. While I have felt (a) only in the past five years or so, the ends (and sometimes even the means) of progressives have an undeniable appeal. Finding a way to improve the world without borrowing the tainted fuel of the gnostics may be tricky.